STAGE WEST: Roustabouts Theatre Co.'s "Looped"

Alex Guzman and Eileen Bowman in "Looped."                                                           Photo by Daren Scott

            The title of what would be her last film, “Die! Die! My Darling!”, sounds like something Talullah Bankhead would have told someone with whom she was royally pissed off.      
            Near the end of her life, however, around the time this horror film was produced, she may have been most pissed off with herself.    
            That’s just one comment playwright Matthew Lombardo makes in his two-act tragicomedy “Looped.” By 1965, when “Die! Die!” was in post-production as it is in this play, Bankhead had long immersed herself in a regimen of heavy drinking, chain smoking, drug use and random acts of sexual activity, with men or women. She may have come off like an aged party girl with the cutting wit of Dorothy Parker and the profane vocabulary of Joe Pesci in “Good Fellas,” but again as we surmise from “Looped,” Bankhead was broken and even rueful about the at-times-respected career onstage and in film that she’d abandoned.
            “Looped” imagines a fictitious moment in time in ’65 in which a staggering Bankhead is summoned to an L.A. studio to “loop” or record one leftover line for “Die! Die! My Darling.” Suffering the slings and arrows of her unpredictability is a young film editor, Danny, whose frustration level soon ventures off the charts.
            Roustabouts Theatre Co.’s current production of “Looped” at the Legler Benbough Theatre in Scripps Ranch is mesmerizing and, as you might figure with a story like this one, funny and sad at the same time. Its star is Eileen Bowman, who does wonder work as Bankhead, a flawed force of nature with a glass of bourbon (or Scotch in this case) in one hand, a cigarette in another, and a head full of recriminations, sodden memories and an eccentric sort of worldly wisdom earned during a long if on-the-downhill career.
            Alex Guzman’s Danny is suitably flummoxed and infuriated by Talullah. In a pretty much telegraphed plot turn, he gets to do much more in the play’s second act.
            Completing the cast and only briefly seen is studio engineer Steve (Chris Braden).
            As much as Lombardo’s entertaining script does, director Phil Johnson accomplishes the tricky feat of maintaining dramatic tension while also allowing the proceedings, especially in Act One, to be frothy and nostalgic. Even when Bankhead is bordering on out of control she’s just human enough, just sympathetic enough, to make us care, even worry for her.
            Much of that credit also goes to Bowman, who in this vivid characterization is no doubt introducing many theatergoers to a personage whose name they may have heard -- but that’s it. In point of fact, Talullah Bankhead had her stellar turns as an actor, both in film (Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”) and on stage.
            Lombardo’s script pointedly addresses Bankhead’s experience with Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” how she turned down the part of Blanche DuBois, how she later played the character in a revival in Florida, mocking herself as the audience mocked her. It’s in this conflict-within-a-conflict that “Looped” is at its most affecting, as is Bowman.
            The play’s second act is quite a departure from the first and to some extent heavy-handed and edging toward sentimentality. But the larger-than-life Bankhead, with a dedicated Bowman in her high-heeled shoes and wrap-around fur, is decidedly not one for sentiment. Even if she calls everyone “dah-ling.”
            “Looped” runs through Oct. 20 at the Legler Benbough Theatre in Scripps Ranch on the campus of Alliant International University.